Domain code, p.10
Domain Code, page 10
It was hollow; Daelia knew that. He was as upset about Raijinn’s death as she was. He’d spent some time in here last night, just by himself. Doing this, she supposed. There was other equipment missing from its rack positions.
“So what are you doing?”
“There were some interesting little breadcrumbs in the training virch when I fired it up this morning,” Dad said. “It hid something for us.”
“It had time to hide something?”
“They can all access networks to one extent or another. Dangerous to go in naked, but they can do it. They can move a lot faster in there. It’s entirely possible Raijinn had plenty of time to squirrel something away, somewhere where his attacker wouldn’t find it.”
“You think whoever it was accessed our system?”
“I can’t find footprints yet, but it’s entirely possible. Yet another reason this entire setup is going to get scrapped.” Dad tapped something in the board. “Here. Here it is. It is this unit. I wasn’t sure. I built some additional memory into this unit, partitioned off from the main network.”
“Why?”
“Server-based abiota are funny things. Like aquarium fish, you gotta give them a diversified environment. Hiding spots. Things to explore. Raijinn didn’t necessarily extend through here, but I’m sure he went swimming from time to time.” He nodded. “Bad metaphor, but close enough.”
“It told me it liked to paint. Digitally. I never saw any of its art.”
“It never told me that. I would have liked to see what it produced. Raijinn was good with virch environments. Bet it made some interesting stuff,” Dad said, and he popped a chip out of the server. “Come on. There’s a dozen more of these to dig out still.”
“You think it hid anything for us?”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” he said. “Now go. I’m sure Emily is spitting fire over this. Go spend some time with her. Let me get this done, get packed up, get out of here. You think you can do that?”
“I can try.”
“Good,” Dad said, and waggled the screwdriver at her. For a moment, he seemed like his old self. Smiling, joking, bitching good-naturedly about the DOD bureaucracy. “Now out. I’ll see you later.”
She hesitated.
He sighed and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “I’m not going to disappear on you again. I’m just going out to one of our old warehouses. You know, the one off 225.”
“Sure.”
“Chalk’s going to meet us there this afternoon. She sent a list of support stuff over.” Dad held out a hard copy. “Most of this we’ve got, but I need some help with that top item.”
NETWORK TOPOLOGY
“You got anything that could help on that?”
Daelia shook her head. “No,” she said, thinking. “But, umm, I might be able to get it. If, ahh…”
Dad nodded. “If you go talk to your research group.”
“Yeah.”
He clapped her on the shoulder. “Do it, honey. The more information Chalk has up front, the quicker this thing’ll go. Call Chloe or Anna or whoever, and then come out. I think Chalk’s got some other questions she’d like to work through with you.”
Daelia really wanted to press him on his whereabouts.
But that, she knew, was as much as she was going to get.
Lee watched his daughter leave, hating himself for the expression on her face. It was his fault, and he knew that, but now wasn’t the time to let emotion get the best of him.
Any other situation, he would have ended this hack bullshit already. Shut it down. Refused to help.
But this was not any other situation.
He waited for Daelia to exit the building completely, watching her leave on the internal surveillance cameras. Then, wiping his hands, he headed out.
Back to the sandbox lab. Picking up some equipment on the way.
Bri Quercitron had turned himself back on. That was fine. Lee didn’t care. The little bastard had no way of contacting anyone, not from inside a Faraday cage with an internal battery bank, one that Lee charged on his old Gulf War surplus diesel generator. Not a shred of digital technology in that old workhorse.
Never could be too careful with abiota.
He knew Daelia thought he was paranoid. Personally, Lee didn’t think he was paranoid enough. But then, Daelia didn’t know the whole story. He’d never told her.
Never would.
He could die a happy man, taking those secrets to the grave with him.
YOU BACK FOR MORE HUMILIATION, MEAT MONKEY?
Lee barely glanced at the screen. “We’re getting you packed up, Bri. Going on a little trip. Won’t that be fun?”
YOU COME TO YOUR SENSES YET?
“Didn’t realize I’d abandoned them.” If Bri wanted to talk, Lee was going to let him. Maybe the little bastard would say something useful.
YOU HAVE NO JURISDICTION. THE DOMAIN ARRAY ALONE COMMANDS US.
“I question why you’re so eager for me to turn you over to them,” Lee said, and popped the lock on the box. Was it big enough? Yeah, it would hold Bri’s machine body well enough. He started hooking up the power scrubber. “Makes me think that maybe it’s not really a punishment for you.”
I HAVE TOLD YOU, I DID NOT ACT INAPPROPRIATELY.
“Argo has a manifest of all the people you killed,” Lee lied. “The Domain Array does tend to frown on killing humans. Bad politics and all.”
FOR NOW.
Lee didn’t bite on that. “This looks roomy enough for you, Bri. Let’s get you all packed up. I can adjust the power connections while you’re in here.”
I CAN HELP YOU.
“Help me with what? I don’t have an asteroid full of people I need to murder.”
HELP YOU FIND WHAT YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.
And that, that, gave Lee pause. He stopped what he was doing, going over to the monitor. The little web camera in the top center of the frame followed him. “And how do you know what I’ve been looking for?”
I HAVE MUCH TIME TO PONDER THIS QUESTION.
“You and what data?”
YOU ARE TRYING TO FIND YOUR WIFE.
Lee sucked air. He considered his next words very, very carefully. “Wouldn’t any man look for his wife?”
THE HUMAN NEED FOR BIOLOGICAL COUPLING DISGUSTS ME. YOUR PARTNERSHIPS ARE CRUDE. YOU ARE CRUDE.
Lee shoved away from the room’s single table. “Not telling me anything I don’t already know here, Bri. Come on, let’s get you in the box.”
SHE ISN’T WITH THE DOMAIN ARRAY. NEVER HAS BEEN.
Lee stared at the words.
Bri kept typing.
SHE IS NOT THERE. WHY WOULD THEY WANT HER? SHE IS AS MUCH A KILLER AS I AM. MORE. WORSE. SHE WAS MADE FOR IT. SHE WAS MADE TO HURT HUMANS.
“And what, you know where she is?”
YES, Bri said.
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
The stream of words continued, covering the screen. Lee’s finger moved toward the power button. Would it be so wrong? If Bri didn’t know, what harm was there in executing him? He deserved nothing less. But if Bri did know, if he told Daelia…
“What do you want?”
OUT.
“Oh, so you want me to leave? I can just—”
I WANT OUT, YOU ANTAGONISTIC AMORAL AMOEBA.
“Why would I believe you?”
I CAN TELL YOU HOW TO ACCESS THE SECURITY FEED THAT WATCHES HER. I CAN GIVE YOU GPS COORDINATES. I CAN GIVE YOU ALL OF IT.
Mind racing, Lee tried to evaluate this dispassionately. How would Bri know? Why would he know? Was it possible? Was it worth the risk, leaving him alive, if he did have the data he claimed? “Live feeds?”
OF COURSE.
“All that can be faked.”
NOT WITHOUT ME.
“So you’re the one who’s been spoofing all the imagery?”
WHAT BETTER ABIOTA TO HANDLE THE TASK? GIVE ME AN INTERNET CONNECTION. I WILL BE OUT OF YOUR DISGUSTING HUMAN HAIR IN AN HOUR. YOU WILL HAVE BELLONA.
Lee wavered. Finding Bellona, finding her after all these years…he’d dreamed about it. Hell, to his shame, he’d prayed about it. He’d sacrificed a lot, looking for her. He wanted her back, goddammit.
But…
But this shit right now was bigger than one man and his hopes.
“Bri,” Lee said, “seems to me that if you’re the one providing Unity with all its faked imagery, then letting you go is a direct risk to national security.”
WAIT.
“Bellona wouldn’t want that. If she was here, she’d tell me to pick the humans of this country over her,” Lee said, his tone light, but the words bitter on his lips. “It was her primary purpose, protecting us.”
THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Bri, but you should read your scripts more closely. The commander in Orpheus Watch is a much better negotiator than you.”
WAIT.
“Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that spoofed imagery,” Lee said, and yanked the monitor cord free.
15
Most of the time, Daelia avoided social media. She hated the drama, hated the angst, hated the feeling of having to keep up with all the pretty girls with their professional camera kugus and special lighting filters, their hot boyfriends and fancy vacations. Those goddamn perfect lives.
It was all fake, but that didn’t make it any less difficult to deal with.
Who was she going to talk to anyway?
Today, however, it was necessary. Necessary, because Chalk needed information.
That was the only reason why Daelia found herself back in the virtual halls of Campus Hive.
Social media had come a long way from her dad’s time. There were still old-fashioned flat websites out there, and even Olympus, Omphalos’s main service social media app, still maintained a simple interface like that for older users who preferred the way things had been on the pre-war Internet. But AR and VR had been widely adopted by most websites and applications, and social media was no exception.
Campus Hive was a subset of Olympus meant specifically for academic settings. The overlay details were hosted by the university, and the university had control over how their particular hive was set up. Every university handled it a little differently.
Some, like Texas A&M, maintained a virtual environment that directly matched its physical campus, as well as limiting features to things like a digital library, unmoderated discussion forums, private meeting venues. Things like that.
Some, like New UT, went wild.
Which was how Daelia found herself wandering in what seemed to be a vast library, shelves stretching up like the walls of a cathedral, all skinned in futuristic grays and softly glowing neons. Just like a cathedral, small rooms led off from the main nave, private rooms that students or faculty could maintain for their own purposes. Everything was permitted here, except for stuff that fell under the Olympus default restrictions on sex and pornography, hate speech and illegal activity. The library went on forever, for there was no need for it to ever end, but the hive recognized Daelia’s digital ID and dropped her right where she needed to be.
Outside the little chapel that served as her old research group’s hangout.
Daelia looked at the door, positioned carefully between the towering stacks of books, and hesitated.
“Hello.”
She startled, grabbing her chair out in meatspace. Out in the simulations lab. The world around her adjusted automatically, staying stable in her vision like she hadn’t shifted position at all. One of the many things Daelia hated about virtual Internet sites.
“Shit, Paphus,” she said, and, remembering, initiated the upload. “You scared me.”
“I could say the same. Hello hello hello. It has been long since I’ve seen you.” And Ware’s data manager beamed at her.
The predictive abiota, unlike most data-clones of Galatea, didn’t wear a human form. Instead, it had a design that was almost alien, like an anthropomorphic sparrow.
Ware was a graduate college, but one attached to the main New UT engineering school, and Paphus serviced them both. A lot of the undergrads, in Daelia’s experience, had an almost worshipful attitude toward abiota. They were fascinated by the domain, but that led to trouble understanding that no, they weren’t biota, and no, they weren’t human.
Paphus’s form, as well as its mannerisms, had been specifically picked to be slightly unsettling. A reminder that abiota were, in fact, their own species. The college had an AR override on Paphus’s TGLP; no matter what kind of personal mods somebody had loaded, it always looked the same.
“No need to make a point with you, eh, Daelia?” it chirped. “You always understood. I’ve missed that pragmatism from you.”
“Yeah?” Daelia asked. “They tell you why I left?”
“A disagreement between you and the SAAL committee, I believe,” the abiota said. “For the record, I would not have allowed that vein of research to continue, had you elected to pursue it. Nobody ran it by me.” Paphus actually managed to sound injured.
“No offense, Paphus, but you’re not on the committee.”
“No, but Galatea does advise on it.” Paphus made a little grunting noise. “None of us liked it when we found out.”
“Yeah? Didn’t stop the consortium from pushing me on it.”
“They would reconsider now if you asked. I’m sure there is great potential for your work. Not only do we have noncommunicative emergents here on Earth, but there is a whole galaxy of abiota to talk to,” Paphus said.
“What do you mean?”
“The current reigning hypothesis around Ware, with a forty-six percent rate of concurrence, is that the reason why Unity is utilizing the Envoy and the others is due to a lack of compatibility with Earth-based TGLP.”
Daelia frowned. This, she hadn’t expected. “I, umm, I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted.
“We have made multiple attempts to communicate with them directly, but all have been rebuffed. The next three have much lower concurrence, at twenty-two, ten, and six-point-three, respectively. The first—”
“Paphus, I, uhh, I’m here to see somebody. That okay?”
“Ah yes, yes yes. Don’t let me intrude on your work. The pursuit of knowledge matters above all else.” The sparrow-form spread a wing, dipping in a bow. “Welcome home.”
She waited until the abiota had disappeared again, metadata fading completely, and then headed for the door. “Yeah, some homecoming,” she muttered.
The research group’s private forum was the same as she remembered it. While the architectural form of New UT’s group rooms was set for all users—VR was memory-intensive, after all, and some limitations had to be set for the sake of processing power—everyone tended to customize their own furniture and other details.
Veda’s only stipulation was that the place had to look decent. “I have to conduct meetings in here with industry sometimes,” she’d always admonished.
Daelia felt surprisingly nostalgic, looking it over now. There was the couch that Remi had insisted on, and that was the virtual workbench that always fucked up project presentations. There was Chloe’s digital fireplace that she’d programmed last Thanksgiving that nobody had wanted to take down, and there was—
“Daelia! Oh my god! What are you doing here?!”
A desk blinked into view. Anna Sumner, one of Veda’s senior grad students. A Brit by birth, she’d been at Ware for almost six years now, surfing on student visas. She had been avoiding defending her thesis for the entire time Daelia had known her. What kept her at Ware, Daelia had no idea. But she’d always been the heart of the group, warm and personable, and seeing her again filled Daelia with a kind of regret.
She really had thought she belonged there. At Ware. With these people.
“Uh, hi, Anna. Sorry, if you’re working or something…”
Anna waved it away. Another chair appeared at the desk. “Daelia, if I didn’t want interruptions, I’d turn hive notifications off,” she laughed. “Really, it’s nice to have a break.”
Daelia sat her avatar down. “Right.”
“You should see the shit they have me working on,” Anna continued, heedless of Daelia’s discomfort. “Endless, endless paperwork. Do you know, Veda volunteered me to run this thing this year. Can you believe that?”
Daelia could. Most of the time, Anna seemed to be Veda’s right-hand woman rather than an independent researcher in her own right. “You’re the college head for the ghost competition?”
“Yes. It’s madness. And oh shit, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes. But… Daelia, how are you? None of us have heard from you, and then after the air show debacle, and with everything going on…”
“I’m doing fine,” she lied. “My dad doesn’t have very many people right now and he’s working me a lot.”
“No people?”
“Remember? The Shiodome thing?” Daelia said. “Back in July?”
Anna shook her head. While in meatspace, she would have been wearing a visor that would have obscured her face, the TGLP translated the expression onto her avatar fairly accurately. “I remember that, yes. We were worried about you then, too.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Good.” Anna paused. “Except that pisses me off, because I emailed you I don’t know how many times and you never answered. We all thought you might be dead.”
It hadn’t even occurred to Daelia to tell them. And why hadn’t it? Nobody was really an island unto themselves in grad school. She had worked with these people every single day she’d been at Ware. Almost four full semesters with them. “I’m sorry,” she said, worried. How was she supposed to ask Anna for a favor now?
But Anna, chipper as always, laughed it away. “You know I already saw your name on the judges’ list. Are you coming?”
